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Near the opening of the Book of Philippians, Paul records his prayer for the Philippian Christians:

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. 1:9-11 NRSV

At the heart of this prayer is Paul's desire that his readers exercise the classical virtue of discernment. He wants them to be able to make good choices, to "determine what is best."1 In his prayer, Paul gives us the anatomy of this virtue. He points to three necessary building blocks for discernment: love, knowledge, and insight. He also describes the desired result of exercising this virtue: holiness and righteousness that will contribute to the glory and praise of God. In this way, the virtue of discernment energizes and empowers the thoughtful, mature Christian life.

In matters of worship, this is exactly the virtue that Christians need today. We already have passion concerning the subject of worship. The charged rhetoric of worship wars shows no signs of abating. In most congregations, there is no lack of opinions about worship matters and no lack of willingness to share them.

We also have voluminous liturgical resources at our fingertips. Our bookstores, magazines, and websites provide us with more songs, prayer texts, and worship service outlines than have been available at any period in church history. Worship conferences have increased tenfold in the past ten years. And even evangelical seminaries are finally offering courses on this central activity of church life.

But for all this energy and all these resources, we often lack the discernment to make good use of them. In fact, what we may need most is a healthy prayer of confession to admit our lack of discernment.

To help make such a prayer concrete, let me provide some examples of the lack of this virtue, drawn mostly from experiences described by my students at Calvin Theological Seminary, Tyndale Seminary, and Northern Baptist Seminary.

In one congregation, a group protested the use of Scripture choruses because they simply repeat the same line ten times over. The same group went on to ask their choir director to sing Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." (True, Handel might have a bit more musical nuance and force than Maranatha, but the naïve use of this argument is still problematic.)

In another congregation, a worship leader protested the use of written prayers because they were so predictable. When the worship committee reviewed tapes of earlier services, however, it discovered that this worship leader had "spontaneously" spoken the same, identical prayer in four consecutive services.

In another congregation, three church leaders recommended and enforced wholesale liturgical change on the basis of attending one conference on worship and evangelism, without so much as one month's discussion and prayer with the congregation.

In another, a church council refused to adopt a proposal to celebrate communion more frequently because "it would cease to be special," an argument that (curiously) is rarely applied to preaching.

What we have here are situations in which committed Christians have somehow lost their theological and pastoral equilibrium. They may have been advocating important and helpful positions, but they lacked the love, knowledge, or insight to help their congregations discuss them in discerning ways.

So what exactly is discernment? Discernment is a classical virtue, a common theme in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and classical philosophy. Discernment is what Solomon wanted when he asked for "an understanding mind … to discern between good and evil" (1 Kings 3:9 NRSV). It is what Paul discusses in Romans 12:2 when he says that the "renewing of [our] minds" will help us "discern what is the will of God" (NRSV). Discernment or prudence, says Augustine, is "love distinguishing with [wisdom] sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it. … Prudence is love making a right distinction between what helps it towards God and what might hinder it."2 Joseph Pieper identified it as "a studied seriousness … a filter of deliberation" and "the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality … the quintessence of ethical maturity."3 Lewis Smedes, more colloquially, says that it is "having a nose for what's going on under the surface."4 Discernment, then, is nearly synonymous with a slightly larger category—wisdom.

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